Cómo Andrew Betts comenzó su viaje en diseño web

Nombre de la empresa

Assanka

Descripción general

Assanka is a technology company that builds web applications, mainly for media and finance clients. We recently developed the new site for TheLondonPaper ( http://www.thelondonpaper.com ), and we do a lot of work with the Financial Times (eg http://ftalphaville.ft.com ). We do development in house and work with third parties for design and creative work. There is more information and case studies on our current website: http://www.assanka.net.

To be clear, we are not a design or creative agency - we build and design software and applications, scalable platforms and massive databases.

Cuéntanos a qué tipo de público quieres llegar

Our audience is twofold: large businesses who should see us as reliable, innovative and stylish but business-friendly with a serious reputation; and developers, who should find us open and accessible, interesting and techy. The two sets of users are looking for very different things. Here are some user stories for each one:

1. Steve, 35, is a product manager for an international media corporation. He controls a million-pound budget and is looking for agencies that can deliver innovative projects reliably on a massive scale. He is not a technophobe, and likes to know that his suppliers know what they're talking about, but he prefers looking at the end result and the bottom line, rather than the mechanics of how things work.

2. Tom, 22, is a JavaScript developer, working freelance. He uses the web extensively to help with coding problems, and attends lots of conferences and networking events. He likes finding useful coding tips and tools on company websites, because they tend to work better than those you find pasted into forums. He aspires to work for an agency that does interesting and innovative stuff and shares it with the community. He gets frustrated with 'marketing-speak', and doesn't trust a company's claims unless they back it up with specific implementation details.

Requisitos

Our website has been around for six years, and we feel that we are no longer projecting the right message to prospective clients and the development community. It is also cumbersome to update on the back-end so we're looking for a fresh design to accompany an overhaul of the CMS that we are doing internally.

The new design will need to work for a home page, article pages, and wiki pages. The main site may be fixed width or liquid, but it must be possible for it to work as a liquid layout so we can use it to publish wiki pages containing lots of complicated documentation that needs the space.

The deliverable for this project is just the homepage, and an idea of how an article page fits into the design (so an article with headline, byline and date but no content). There will be a subsequent contest for all the various UI controls that we need - headings, tables, lists, tags, code blocks etc. For the moment we just want to find a style and design we like, then we'll commission the detailed elements for article pages.

If you have any queries please post comments, or contact andrew@assanka.net